Traveling, but this Time in Europe (Newsletter the Second)
Dearest readers,
When we left you, we were in the gray MRI tube of an airplane, drinking orange juice out of a little cup. No longer.
At dawn, we arrived into Paris (P-ah-strong r from the back of the throat - and then that eeee sound), to find that yesterday's rain had conveniently shied away for our arrival, leaving only a silken gloss over every surface. We were low on sleep but high on this clear-sky sunrise, and we were determined to ride as many trains as possible in order to look down upon the USA and its sick-sorry-awful train infrastructure. So we leapt onto the light rail, which took us across the flat suburbs of Paris (You’re pronouncing it in your head like I spelled it out for you earlier, right?) and headfirst into the mouth of the city. Only moments after the sliding doors closed, a man began to play an accordion, spindling out the light and dancey notes of La Vie en Rose. This was so perfectly French that for a moment I thought we might have entered a movie set instead of the thing itself.
Paris proper is sun-basking and settled in its antiquity. The city possesses a certain mindless repetition — rows and rows of sepia neoclassical and Art Nouveau buildings all cut off at the same height, cafes with dozens of identical tables-for-two, so many identical romances poised to begin and end over the same candlelight. We slip into a cafe across from the station and document the entire lifespan of one such romance, two passing souls whispering to each other over coffee, at two separate tables. But it is only nine in the morning, and one leaves the other behind, gifting her that certain sense of open loneliness when someone-who-was-a-potential vanishes into the big city once and forever.
As luck would have it, our cafe served more than romance, and Owen and I ordered twin meals: divine croque madames and foamy cappucinos, which were engaged in their own intense love affair with each other before we violently dismembered them, death-by-fork-and-knife. Owen people-watched and corrected my sorry French; the president, or at least someone important enough to have an extensive police motorcade, or at least some extensive police motorcade, crashed through the street behind us. We awaited the specter of the French military and their assault rifles. Romance to war — when had breakfast become so violent? But I suppose food is always a passionate affair.
The rain, like the military, held back long enough for a stroll down to the Seine, which cuts through Paris like the Mediterranean cuts through France.* We found — a SPIRE — a Paralympic gathering that was quite literally blown over by wind — and a reliable way to identify the tourists and the French, who certainly couldn’t have identified us in return. Paris, like its romances, was brief. In a few flashes we were hurrying to the train, just as the skies started weeping for our departure. It rains as we leave Paris behind, on a south-bound train.
Outside the train window is a long catalog of life: flat green farms speckled with golden barns, hills choked tight with dark forest where entire alien worlds hunt each other into extinction, spreads of promising city across the horizon, rock wall carved-up red, rows of knotty trees, a lushness that lodges itself in the part of your heart made for longing, the open ocean, the dune-sand condos that block our view of the sea. We leave city behind for beach, no brown leaves, only a relentless sun that bakes up all the clay homes into pots, pots for people to hole up in, away from the physical reality shaped by their own hands. These are the cities that dot the coast as we inch toward Nice.
In Nice, we find a dollhouse Notre Dame cathedral and miles of sidewalk, miniature tourists traipsing out of their summer mansions and calling this their home, ignoring that the word itself is foreign to the land. I imagine Owen and I climbing to the top of the highest balcony and watching all of the South of France, all those human ants swarming the mound and running desperately up to the sea. Up there I have the sense we are another type of insect instead, butterflies pinned down to felt, splayed between the rising green housed hills on one side, and the impression of sea just over the horizon.
Appropriately, our butterfly-case home for the next few days is perched at the top of five flights of rickety stairs, ringed with wiry balcony and dropped in the middle of an alleyway of restaurants and shops, a slim secret filed away in Nice’s backlogs. Logistics drip into our lives like stalactites forming overhead at the 181st street subway station. What do you mean the outlets are all differently shaped? What do you mean we have to speak French? We talk about language because I am me and Owen is Owen.
We find dinner! Only after receiving a few rejections first, but this is always good practice in life. Our Italian waiter serves us Italian food and Italian drinks and tiramisu with an Italian accent; we convince ourselves we are still in France only by telephoning words to ourselves in the language (t-strong r from the back of the throat- ay sound bien. that’s très bien). It has been nine hours since our croque madames romanced each other in Paris; the Italian food disappears in a few moments and so does the illusion we are in Italy. We have been eating out of evening’s hand for many hours already, by the time we stumble home with wine and twenty thousand steps tapped out on our wrists—when we reach for more, evening retreats, and somehow Owen is asleep on the couch and I am asleep on the bed for half an hour.
At this point, our current protagonists, down on their luck and energy, in their hour of darkest need, crashing to the point of late-evening naps, having little hope left in their own selves and at the point of giving up, encounter the two new heroes in our story: Alexa and Ariana, fresh from a hellish AirFrance flight from the same romantic city our heroes and all heroes escape from. They rush in with artichoke pizza, gossip, smiles. The night spirals down into the last fumes and dregs of sleep-absent conversation, out on the balcony, dreamy shadow-animals in the smoky light.
Nice is a place that other places observe and try to copy. There is a crude pasting of pale pink and palm trees and white trim, light rail and crowded condos, which you can see in all of those fleeting model cities. Each element by itself is not Nice, yet the coalescence is — but even though Nice is the original, having seen the copy, it is impossible not to see the copy in Nice, and the copy of the copy, and the copy of its copy, all overlaid on each other, interfering with the original, singular, beautiful bright thing. There is this layer of film we will have to peel back, tomorrow.
As always, write us with your unsolicited and solicited input, gripes and enjoyments, responses and frustrations. And pay no mind to the free-flow between past and present tense, unless this bothers you immensely.
Sunnily,
Frog and Iggy (Laura and Owen)
March 23-24, 2024
*Harris, Owen. “Remarks Given at Paris River Walk,” My Life in Quotes. 2028.